Do You Want Barrage To Be A Support Gem In PoE?

In Path of Exile, with GGG announcing their intention to revamp under-used/under-performing skills, I figured I’d share an opinion I’ve had for a while now: Barrage should be a support gem rather than an active gem.

Currently, Barrage is by far the most-used skill by both bow characters and wanders because there aren’t many other skills that compete when it comes to single-target damage.

The solution, in my eyes, is to allow the effect of Barrage to be applied to other ranged attacks, massively increasing the variety of skills to choose from. This would also potentially allow for Barrage to be used as a support for spells, allowing for some much-needed single-target damage for projectile spells.

An additional thought is to create the suggested Barrage Support and also give it the Channeling tag. I feel this is thematically very fitting, and would also allow for the use of channeling supports if desired, opening up some more build possibilities.

There are plenty of projectile support gems to support clearing (GMP, LMP, Volley, Chain, Fork), but mechanically interesting single-target supports are very limited – in fact, Slower Projectiles is the only one I can think of that actually affects mechanics at all and isn’t just a more multiplier, and that isn’t really that interesting for most skills.

So having a single-target support that also affects the skill mechanically would be great, and a Barrage Support seems like an obvious contender to me, along with removing the dominance of Barrage and allowing more variety in bow skills.

One player think that although not disagreeing with the concept of my idea, he don’t think it is the change there are needed. The goal should be a revamp where it gives actual choices and not making gem like your design, into yet another “mandatory” gem. What’s your opinion?